A novel of colonialism and revolution, death, sexual violence and political and spiritual impotence.

In his long-awaited, vastly innovative new novel, Naipaul, "one of literature's great travelers" (Los Angles Times), spans continents and centuries to create what is at once an autobiography and a fictional archaeology of colonialism. "Dickensian . . . a brilliant new prism through which to view (Naipaul's) life and work."--New York Times.

In 1975, at the height of Indira Gandhi s Emergency, V. S. Naipaul returned to India, the country his ancestors had left one hundred years earlier. Out of that journey he produced this concise masterpiece: a vibrant, defiantly unsentimental portrait of a society traumatized by centuries of foreign conquest and immured in a mythic vision of its past.
Drawing on novels, news reports, political memoirs, and his own encounters with ordinary Indians from a supercilious prince to an engineer constructing housing for Bombay s homeless Naipaul captures a vast, mysterious, and agonized continent...

The history of Trinidad begins with a delusion: the belief that somewhere nearby on the South American mainland lay El Dorado, the mythical kingdom of gold. In this extraordinary and often gripping book, V. S. Naipaul himself a native of Trinidad shows how that delusion drew a small island into the vortex of world events, making it the object of Spanish and English colonial designs and a mecca for treasure-seekers, slave-traders, and revolutionaries.
Amid massacres and poisonings, plunder and multinational intrigue, two themes emerge: the grinding down of the Aborigines during the long...

Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul brings his signature gifts of observation, his ferocious impatience with received truths, and his masterfully condensed prose to these eleven essays on reading, writing, and identity which have been brought together for the first time.
Here the subject is Naipaul s literary evolution: the books that delighted him as a child; the books he wrote as a young man; the omnipresent predicament of trying to master an essentially metropolitan, imperial art form as an Asian colonial from a New World plantation island. He assesses Joseph Conrad, the writer most frequently...

The Caribbean area--a scattering of ethnic and racial groups with a history of colonialism and bloody attempts to assert nationhood--provides an exciting background for these tales of wit, melancholy, resentment, fantasy, and superstition. If the Caribbeans are searching for a "newness," a "cool upheaval of the spirit," as Salkey suggests in the introduction, then the writers gathered together here--from the outstanding such as V. S. Naipaul, Samuel Selvon, and John Hearne to the younger, little-known, and never before published--are true to this spirit.

No writer has rendered our boundariless, post-colonial world more acutely or prophetically than V. S. Naipaul, or given its upheavals such a hauntingly human face. A perfect case in point is this riveting novel, a masterful and stylishly rendered narrative of emigration, dislocation, and dread, accompanied by four supporting narratives.

In the beginning it is just a car trip through Africa. Two English people--Bobby, a civil servant with a guilty appetite for African boys, and Linda, a supercilious "compound wife" 117]-- are driving back to their enclave after a stay in the capital ...